“We were so close”: Life after Conscience and the Abraham Accords

by Kathy Kelly
Pax Christi USA 1998 Teacher of Peace

The following essay was originally published here on World BEYOND War.

“We were so close,” Cassandra Dixon wrote from Malta, where she had hoped to board Conscience, the aptly named Freedom Flotilla ship which was bombed by two weaponized drones, almost certainly launched by Israel, on May 2, 2025. Cassandra had traveled to Malta after spending six weeks in Masafer Yatta, the West Bank region where, for two months, she lived among villagers whom local Israeli settlers constantly persecuted.

In a blog post entitled Hard Days in Masafer Yatta, Cassandra told of villagers stunned and bewildered by round after round of violent attacks. Vehicles torched, olive trees destroyed, wells poisoned. Settlers barged into homes, beating villagers who had been sound asleep. With their vehicles destroyed, villagers relied on a hostile Israeli military for transport to emergency rooms and intensive care units. The military would then arrest dozens of young villagers for indefinite detention without trial.

In a recent letter, Cassandra wrote about a man who lay on the ground, bleeding, after attacking settlers shot his leg. Soldiers chatted amiably with the settlers before finally arresting him, shackling him to a gurney, and taking him to an Israeli hospital where a surgeon amputated his leg.

During a 2023 sojourn among villagers in the south Hebron hills, a settler fractured Cassandra’s skull with a heavy stick. Not one to draw attention to herself, she persisted with a court case in hopes of building precedents to protect vulnerable Palestinians.

She and her companions aiming to reach Gaza insist on breaking the siege. Their effort to deliver food, fuel, medicine, tents, and water represents international sanity, a symbolic, challenging effort to nonviolently resist Israel’s savagery.

They long to reach Gaza’s shore with supplies for victims of Israeli bombardment, knowing the victims’ skin grafts will not heal without adequate nutrients. They want to help doctors in Gaza’s hospitals treat diabetes patients denied insulin by the Israeli blockade. They know the heart-wrenching consequences when hospitals lack cardiac catheters, blood pressure medicines, and potable water. They shudder when they hear reports of women fueling ovens with old sneakers, or Doctors Without Borders assessments that Gaza’s main desalination plant now produces potable water at only 10 percent of its former capacity.

“Chose life, that you and your descendants might live” (Deuteronomy 30) speaks to their deepest values.

Urgently, onlookers must conscientiously choose between the rhetoric of unarmed peacemakers and the ugly threats of Israel’s leaders.

“They need to starve,” said Israeli Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu on May 6, speaking about Gaza to the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth. “If there are civilians who fear for their lives, they should go through the emigration plan” (a term for ethnic cleansing into tent refugee cities).

“Whoever harms us will be harmed by us, sevenfold,” Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz said in a May 5 statement, vastly understating the brutal disproportionality of Israel’s escalating regional violence.

In fact, Mr. Katz is securing deepened isolation for Israel, a country now surrounded by populations it has remorselessly bombed and bullied. With nuclear weapons bunkered at the Negev desert’s Shimon Peres Nuclear Research Center, among other locations, Israel’s defiance of international law incalculably intensifies the nuclear threat throughout its region and the world.

Now, lead Trump envoy Steve Witkoff hints at an upcoming expansion of the Abraham Accords, a set of bilateral treaties between Israel and US-allied autocracies which essentially serve as massive arms deals in exchange for normalization of relations with Israel. To date, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco and Sudan have entered into these agreements which leave the issue of Palestinian safety and self-determination totally out of the picture. One by one, the Arab countries entering into the Abrahamic Accords abdicate meaningful solidarity with Palestine in exchange for economic deals and access to state-of-the-art US weapons which they use to subjugate domestic dissent and engage in foreign wars.

Pressing forward with the Abraham Accords will embolden Saudi Arabia to seek nuclear technology from the United States. So far, Mohammad bin Salman has refused cooperation with UN oversight agencies, and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has assured the world that if Iran acquires nuclear weapons, Saudi Arabia will also get them.

The Abraham Accords are not a peace deal: they represent a confederacy of killers.

Why should countries that have sown havoc and suffering throughout the region be exalted as brokers of peace? The nations of the world should be forging strong bonds to resist Israel’s genocidal ethnic cleansing by suspending Israel from the General Assembly, halting all weapon shipments to Israel, and ending all trade with illegal Israeli settlement industries. The United Nations Security Council should be invoking Chapter VII of the UN Charter to set up a peace-keeping entity tasked with ensuring delivery of food and humanitarian aid to Palestinians now being starved by Israel.

President Trump and his envoy Steven Witkoff understand real estate transactions. Bludgeoning opponents, in their undereducated views, will lead to success. Hence, it seems the Abraham Accords will imminently be signed. These accords normalize Israel’s bloodthirsty refusal to acknowledge Palestinian human rights, including the right to live.

In contrast to the sluggish, dull response of the world’s political leaders, I think of Pope Francis, who, before his death, asked that the specific “Popemobile” he had used to criss-cross Palestine during his final visit there be turned into a mobile health clinic.

Fr. John Dear tells about French peace activists who sought Pope Francis’s advice, a few years ago. “Start a revolution,” Pope Francis responded. “Stir things up. The world is deaf. You have to open its ears.”

Last spring, a worldwide student movement for Gaza led us closer and closer to conversion, turning away from greed and fear, extending the hand of friendship to those who are most in need, telling the truth to, and about, the powerful, and exposing the sins of militarism.

In the Hebrew scriptures we are told that when Father Abraham had raised his arm, bearing a knife, to slay his son, Isaac, an angel appeared to him, saying “Do not lay a hand upon the boy.” In Wilfrid Owen’s interpretation of the story, the angel continues: “Behold, / a ram, caught in a thicket by its horns; / Offer the ram of pride instead.”

This is the Abraham Accord that should be enacted, releasing all captives, making reparations for suffering caused, and vowing to end to all wars.

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Kathy Kelly is board president of World BEYOND War. She has visited multiple war zones, including Gaza, and has been imprisoned in federal prison for protesting weapons and wars.